Posted
by
samzenpus
on Friday November 02, 2012 @04:33AM
from the smells-like-gene-spirit dept.

First time accepted submitter GrimAndBearIt writes "NASA's Curiosity rover is poised to settle years of debate on the question of atmospheric methane on Mars, which would be a sign of microbial life. With parts per trillion sensitivity, it's not so much a question of whether the rover will be able to smell trace amounts of methane, but rather a question of how much. NASA has announced that Grotzinger's team will discuss atmospheric measurements at a briefing on 2 November. If the rover has detected methane at sufficiently high concentration, or exhibiting temporal variations of the kind that suggests microbial activity, then it will surely motivate a desire to identify and map the sources."

Hopefully a reference to "Iron Sky II"? And Im still waiting to see the first one [ironsky.net], in a theater, on DVD, Netflix, anything. I got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell, er, swastikas.

Not only that - said jokes are really plain and primitive. You can make a wide variety of jokes starting from "yo mama" (yo mama is so fat, that even the rover on Mars smelt her methane), all through "Uranus" jokes (to precisely detect methane you'll have to send the rover to Uranus), to some more abstract (let's hope that Mars is not a really shy planet, otherwise it'll become even more Red Planet if we manage to find methane there) and so on.

Considering that fart humor is a longstanding tradition (even the great Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca is on record with a fart joke or two), all I have to say is:Whomever criticizes my verse made the atmosphere worse!

Judging by the recent proliferation of folks who don't know when and when not to use an spostrophe, don't know who's from whose, or their from there, refusal to use capitalization, I'd say there are way too many ignorant teenagers here.

Manned space exploration is inspiring. Sending out a bunch of probes.... not so much.

SpaceX has spent just $1 Billion in 10 years, and is looking by far the leading contender for landing the first man on Mars. The Mars Curiosity project costed $2.5 Billion. NASA's Orion spacecraft will probably be cancelled the moment a new President steps into office, replaced with a new project designed to redistribute pork-barrel money.

NASA's greatest recent achievement was providing approx $500 Million of funding to Sp

As opposed to your oh-so-informative post? At least they tried, you're just complaining.

No, they didn't, they made a lazy joke because they didn't have anything better to say. Seriously, if people didn't have anything to add except being the 100th person to make the same obvious joke, they'd contribute more by not saying anything.

It's very noticeable on Slashdot that when the discussion involves something scientific that's even moderately outside the core interests/competences of the average reader (i.e. tech and computer-related sciences), the number of jokes goes up.

to go with a set of small, dedicated probes that can only do a few things (say mass spec, air sampling, basic instruments) that have no mobility. They'd be loaded in bulk onto a platform to go from Earth to Mars, then into orbit. As it orbits, the platform drops the probes off at certain intervals, or in certain specific places. You could have a mix of probes doing different things, and use the one that would give the most information for that area; hell, you ould make it refillable, and send more as needed.

More limited than a rover, but much less expensive, and a lot less that could go wrong.... with a lot larger coverage area.

Seriously? Do you have any idea just how fricking big a planet is? Although smaller than Earth, Mars is HHHUUUUGGGEEEE on human scales. And it is all empty. Barren. Desolate. Look out your window now, and imagine all the buildings, roads, people, animals, plants, rivers, oceans... everything except for the dirt and the rocks.. gone. All the way to the horizon. Just barren, rocky nothingness. Now imagine that from the horizon to the next horizon. And again, and again, and again. Imagine walking or driving for weeks or months through that landscape, seeing nothing but rocks, rocks, dirt and rocks. And you thought it was a long way down the road to the chemist.

Do you really think a few tiny bits of technology scattered here and there - hundreds or thousands of miles apart - are really going to spoil the view? And for who exactly? If there is life on Mars it's not exactly going to be worried about property prices. You could strip-mine an area the size of Brazil into a toxic sludgepile and still have infinitely more square kilometres of perfectly-preserved rocky boringness left over than you'd know what to do with.

The hard truth is, most of space is dead, dead, dead. There might be a lot of question marks in the Drake equation, but even with the most optimistic numbers, most of the of the worlds in this galaxy are just drab, sterile rocks floating in a vacuum, with nothing better to offer existence than to be explored and exploited by us. Undoubtedly there are pristine habitats and natural wonders out there worthy of preservation. Olympus Mons almost certainly counts among them. The Valles Marineres too, and doubtless other sites yet to be discovered. Yet another Martian plain, however, does not warrant UNESCO galactic heritage status, and even if it did I would still dispute your assertion that a little remote-controlled buggy driving over it is somehow ruining it forever.

And besides, even if we did find life on another world- not even intelligent or even multicellular life- then you can bet your luddite ass that NASA and their counterparts in other space programs would be insanely respectful of it. If Curiosity digs up a microbe on Mars, they'd be extra-triple sure their next mission was even less likely to bring Earth organisms to the planet than the last. Hell, they would probably seriously question whether to send anything else to the surface at all. And not just because they wouldn't want to contaminate the science - they'd do it because that microbe is important in its own right, and it would be wrong for us to jeopardise its survival, and because Mars rightfully belongs to the microbes.

Trying to portray our planet's space scientists as inconsiderate jerks firing shit up into space willy-nilly like a bunch of rednecks with a stack of beercans and a skeetshooter does no justice at all to a group of thoughtful, intelligent and passionate people who value the beauty and majesty of the heavens a thousand times more than you or I ever will.

The Valles Marineres too, and doubtless other sites yet to be discovered. Yet another Martian plain, however, does not warrant UNESCO galactic heritage status, and even if it did I would still dispute your assertion that a little remote-controlled buggy driving over it is somehow ruining it forever.

Interesting you mentioned this, as it is depicted as a constant point of conflict in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy [wikimedia.org] - where one group of settlers is violently opposed to the ongoing terraforming of Mars and argue that humans have no right to change its pristine state.

Speaking of the Drake equation, I think we have to content ourselves with exploring whatever prospect of life there is in our solar system only. If not Mars then Europa holds the next big hope of finding life in its ice locked sea. All the

More limited than a rover, but much less expensive, and a lot less that could go wrong....

Yes, (much, much) more limited than a rover, but no, not much less expensive in the end. You're talking a big and fairly capable mother platform to carry and communicate with more than one or two probes, and those don't come cheap. (Neither do the EDL systems for the probes.) And no, there isn't much less that could go wrong - each probe could go wrong, and you have a single point of failure in the mother platform.

So, for not much less money and roughly the same level of mission risk - rather than getting comprehensive science on a single location, you get pretty much useless individual and unrelated data points from a variety of locations.

This was on a fairly recent Discover-channel-ish documentary. They didn't detect organic compounds, so that voided their criteria. Might suck for us, but I'm on the Carl Sagan boat; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Make sure all your t's are crossed and i's dotted before you start mistaking some new chemical reaction or contamination for life.

Methane being unstable and easily destroyed in the Martian atmosphere is the whole point of using it as a 'life-tracer': if it is around at high and unaccounted for amounts, then there has to be continuously produced somehow, and so far a biological origin for its production cannot be ruled out.

If you read the article, you will find that "NASA's Curiosity rover is poised to settle the question as early as this week." No findings have been released as no data has been acquired (at least nothing acknowledged in the article). In any case, the presence of methane is of less interest than the concentration; it is found in interstellar space http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1991ApJ...376..556L [harvard.edu]

Even if there is temporal variation, why are they so certain that the methane in the air is due biological activities?

They are not, in fact scientists have been really busy trying to come up with alternate explanations for the presence of methane on Mars. However, the indications that the methane may be due to life are strong enough to make this worth investigating even though the odds are probably rather slim.

And let us assume that microbial life is the explanation we are or, better, NASA is going for. What then ? Will this radically change the focus of Mars exploration ? Are we then going to search frantically for said microbes ? And if so: how ? And when ? And where ?

Mission after mission, eh?
Which missions? I can only think of one two-lander mission; Viking Mars mission (1&2) in 1976. Nothing since then.
There was the ill-fated British Beagle lander, but that was underfunded, seriously under-tested, and probably hopeless. It cratered.
Life-seeking missions would have to drill under the surface and then be able to perform a battery of tests. Not an easy task.

If there's any evidence of life whatsoever on Mars, likely, any attempt to put humans on Mars will complicate any attempt to learn more about it.

Taking the long view, if there's any life there at all, then we would probably be doing the wrong thing to put anything living on Mars at all (in case we contaminate or interfere with what's already there), which rules out manned missions and human settlement.

But....first MSL has to detect methane and then it has to get enough to run the TLS isotope detection.
Also enhanced C12 suggests life but this is based on Earth life. Maybe Mars life is different, if it even exists.
Also a baseline for the a-biotic Mars C13/C12 ratios for Mars needs to be established which not easy either....

Where is the missive from K'breel warning the martians about this impending disaster? Could it be that the methane has already taken out this planetary spokesman?

The Council has been in deliberations. K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, summarized the minutes of the deliberations thusly:

"Why, do the beings from the blue world seem so fixated on the offensive properties of methane, a gas released during respiration? Yet they completely ignore the offensive properties of water vapor, the substance most co

Methane detection by SAM is negative. There is either no methane or a negligible amount right now. This could change over time, but I'm betting the claims of methane detection from Earth will eventually be blamed on noise and we'll find no methane on Mars over time.

a dislike of fart smells would probably reduce your chance of reproducing

I don't think a dislike of certain kinds of smells is going to be this AC's main impediment to reproduction once he reaches sexual maturity. His never getting up the courage to leave his mommy's house will be higher on the list.

Joking aside, it is entirely possible that what the rover is detecting could be coming from the rover itself. There are all sorts of plastics on the rover: wiring insulation and cable ties, paint, adhesives, etc. that may be breaking down and giving off methane. There may be residues from the pyrotechnics that may be leaching traces of the gas. So yeah. It may be a case of "He who smelt it, dealt it".

Just out of curiosity (no pun intended), wouldn't it be fairly easy to identify false positives? For example, if the concentration of methane appears to increase the longer the rover is stationary the more likely it is that it's coming from the rover rather than the atmosphere, assuming no wind anyway. And if there was wind any methane produced by the rover would be carried away and become a non-issue as well, right?